The present invention relates to a disc apparatus and more particularly to improvements in a disc apparatus, such as a video disc apparatus and a floppy disc apparatus, for handling a disc mounted in a cartridge.
For example, in an optical disc apparatus, a disc is mounted in a cartridge, when the cartridge is pushed in a slot provided in a disc apparatus body, a dust protective door of the slot is opened so that the cartridge is loaded in a predetermined position, where the reproducing and the recording are performed, by a mechanism provided inside the disc apparatus body. At this time, a shutter of the cartridge is opened and the disc is set to a spindle motor. Thus, the recording/reproducing is performed. Thereafter, when an operator pushes an eject button provided outside the body of the disc apparatus after the completion of the recording/reproducing operation, the cartridge is unloaded and its shutter is closed. Then, the cartridge is transferred in a direction of being discharged towards the slot, to be ejected from the slot. Such an apparatus is, for example, described in JP-A-63-58374 (U) (the term "U" used herein means that the utility model application was laid open to public inspection but has not been examined).
With such a disc apparatus, in inserting the cartridge, the cartridge must be straightly inserted into the slot. In other words, after making the distal end of the cartridge correspond in position to the slot correctly, the cartridge must be straightly pushed in a direction perpendicular to the surface of the slot. However, since the cartridge must be correctly introduced into the loading mechanism provided inside the disc apparatus body, a gap between the slot and the cartridge is considerably small. Therefore, it is impossible to perform the insertion operation at one time. For example, the cartridge having an optical disc of 30 cm size mounted therein is heavy and large, and therefore, it requires considerable labor to insert that cartridge.